Total Conversion Mods to play Obsidian generated doom 2 Maps with...

 The Obsidian Map Generator for doom 2 is out...   Here is a list of doom TC's to play it with that are fun to play... I have played all of these so far and I can voutch for them so far... If you need to play them with an optional texture pack you need to find on the internet they will be marked with a *, if it's not marked with an * then the texture pack is included. The difficulty is measured on the easiest  skill...

Mod                            Game it's based on                   Level theme          Difficulty

half-doomed              Half-Life 1:                             tech                       hard

Xim's star wars*          Jedi Knight                               tech                      medium/hard

ww-nazis                    Wolfenstein  3d                          tech                      hard
Dn3doom                     Duke Nukem 3D                      urban or tech       very easy
Quake style unbound   Quake 1/2/4                             tech                      easy
Serious Doom Plus      Serious Sam                             tech                     very very hard
Wrath of Cronos          Heretic/hexen                           tech                     hard


When generating maps for the mods, make sure obsidian texture pack is TURNED OFF...  Also don't do super hard maps that obsidian sometimes defaults to by setting lower bound to none and upper bound to merciless, and quantity set to mix it up. If it's set that way and your mod is anything above easy you should change quantity to easy before generating, trust me.  

Also it's important to not download the mods from the official sites, always always download from these links because the official sites lack the  texture packs 90% of the time due to me making them...  Load the mods with the batch files included and put a space after calling the batch file in a dos prompt and fill the level name in there but make sure to not include  the wad extension...

All texture packs minus dn3doom and xim's star wars doom were made by me  The wolfenstein one is a patched version of the hexen 2 texture disguise and has been bug fixed and has spear resurrection textures put in. The serious sam one is based on the texture disguise but has had high tech textures put in that are really serious sam textures.. They were gotten from some serious sam to doom texture pack.  The quake style unbound texture packs were made from scratch based on the quake 1, quake 2, and ikbase textures found on the realm667 beastiary to replace doom textures with quake 1, quake 2 or ikbase textures...

Screenshots:

I recently moved all my game modding files to dropbox...

 Due to limits of disk space being imposed on my pcloud drive, I decided to delete all my mods from the pcloud... Instead I moved them to dropbox...   Where They fit fine... I did this because I am uploading a lot of albums to pcloud now to host tons of albums by 7 solo artists...  That takes up a LOT of space...

Anyway the following mods are available now:

open world doom - here
Quake style unbound texture mods - here
Serious Doom Plus - Here

The open world doom mod is a rpg mod that turns doom into an open world rpg... It loads a randomly generated oblige/obaddon wad to play it...  Extract all the files to your doom 2 folder and run loadrpgow.bat to play it...  Bind keys to open menu and weapon zoom (to drop weapons with it)... That drop weapon key can be found in action the rest is in the normal bind keys...  Keep in mind their are limits to how many guns you can carry at once and the same is true for mods... Use mods to mod your guns or make new ones.... Mods are inventory items that allow you increase weapons firerate, damage, or accuracy... Using certain weapon mods on weapons selected you can make new guns...   Here are some formulas...

High powered weapon (for almost any basic weak weapon) - blue + red
Tactical shotgun (for combat shotguns only) - red + brown non striped

The quake texture pack mod allows you to play quake style unbound, a randomizer mod with lots of quake 1/2 enemies and guns, with quake textures.. There are 3 versions. A quake 1 texture version, a quake 2 version, and an ikbase version... To play the quake 1 version run the loadrpgqk with the wad after it in a dos prompt like this (loadrpgqk wad) (wad should not have an extension)..  Do the same for loadrpgq2 and loadrpgik...   Each loads the right music.... These texture packs are designed to be run with oblige/obaddon and obsidian maps that happen to be high tech themed.

Serious doom Plus is an altered serious Doom mod that takes serious doom, and loads music and textures from serious sam on top of it into tech randomly generated obaddon/obsidian maps and adds new enemies and altfires on top of that plus an rpg system. the rpg system uses credits to upgrade your character, which includes buying movement speed, damage resistance and max health upgrades for money per levelup... It also has 5 cyborg powers to use which you should bind to f1-f5. The selected item to buy should be bound to q and the buy item should be bound to e..  Have fun...

Obaddon is dead, but there is a oblige modification to replace it....

For the last few years, my eyes have been glued to obaddon, a project to create an expansion for the doom map generator oblige that introduces new prefabs, new features, and more... This addon is good enough to take the default oblige levels and add serious improvements to them, both detail wise and feature wise... Features such as sloped floors, extra detail, ambient sounds, colored lighting, city streets, and more... It added in a lot of new features... And a lot of new prefabs on top of that, so many I can't describe them all, but most are great, minus a few annoying ones, anyway...

Now obaddon has been in development limbo since 2020... It got one release released in 2020 after doing a release per month almost every release... Now it's dead... The people behind it have decided to quit making it... I am shocked honestly.. They turned oblige into a beast of map design that no one else could even come cloee to doing...  But that isn't as bad as it looks because a new map generator has been designed to replace it...

Obsidian (Available here), is a new modified version of oblige that is in beta now.. Featuring 90% of the features obaddon had, it is a little bit different... For one the shape rules are drastically improved, being far less symmetrical.  There are new textures being put into the maps that can be put in when you enable "Zdoom : obsidian textures".  Like Armaetus textures in obaddon, that introduces new prefabs and foliage too...  And those textures are SICK looking... Here are screenies of a few:

While these textures look like they came from doom 3, they still look good.  Some other features obsidian has that obaddon lacks are the ability to shut off almost all gameplay features that had no gui option on obaddon, like the damaging hallways (I HATED them), crushers, etc...  There are also some new prefabs only found in obsidian that are not in obaddon...  And installation is easy compared to obaddon, which involved downloading a zip, extracting it to a new folder, zipping up subfolders found in a subfolder of that folder, and renaming the zip to a pk3 file to put it in oblige's addon folder...  With obsidian all you need to do is install it to an obsidian folder to replace an older version after deleting that folder first... MUCH simpler...

One feature however will save obsidian... Obaddon seems to be lacking in enemy counts compared to obsidian... With default obaddon settings, the enemy count rarely went higher than 30 per room. Now with default obsidian settings the enemy count sometimes jumps to hundreds per room, making me salivate over the slaughtermap potential of this oblige mod...   This could make it possible to do a sunder killer in it easily... That impresses me..  It impresses me because a lot of people like oblige developers and obaddon developers have been trying to CUT BACK the enemy count! This is like a big middle finger to them I think, And I approve... 
 Anyway, I highly suggest trying this map generator out... It takes a lot of setting changes to make it make proper levels, like turning off barrels, turning off dark outdoors, turning off damaging hallways, and more, but it's worth it... It even makes heretic and hexen maps... But I don't know how good they are compared to obaddon heretic maps... I don't have hexen to test it so I can't say if it does hubs or hexen styled traps but we'll see... New features that might make it later on I heard are randomly generated acs scripting and acs compiling by the generator, I hope that happens, because randomly generated ACS would be sick.... Anyway, check this out... And if it turns out that the levels end up becoming unbearably unfair or something later on, I'll let you know...

One thing, make sure you download beta 19 preview 3, not 4... 4 is buggy as hell and crashes every time you try to make a map... Go for 3 instead....

Doom Wad Reviews : Planisphere 2 and Deimos Deja Vue

 I am doing 2 more doom wad reviews people.  This time around we are reviewing 2 new doom maps I've been playing lately. Lets start out with the worst of the two, Deimos Deja Vue.  Even though Deimos Deja Vue is the worst of the two, that doesn't mean it's a bad map.  In fact it's insanely good for an ultimate doom episode, replacing my favorite doom 1 episode, Episode 2, with modified levels that take rooms from the original levels, spice them up and switch around rooms a lot on top of that, so room a might be swapped with room b.  The levels in this level set are nice, fit episode 2 well, and are well balanced. The only issue I could find was the annoying map24-esque balancing act section of e2m2. Everything else was fine and I especially liked the later levels, I thought they improved e2m5-e2m7 well. E2m9 is ok thouigh, probably is the only bad level in the wad.

However, this wad has NOTHING on the next one I am going to talk about.

Planisphere 2 is maybe the BEST city level doom 2 has ever seen. Taking heavy influence from real places in New York City,  this level recreates ALL of Manhattan, Part of Brooklyn, Part of Eastern New Jersey and some other areas well. The sheer size of this level is amazing in itself. Clocking at 6 miles by 6 miles in virtual size, this level may win a guineas world record for the biggest Doom Map that performs well. On my system it runs really well which is nice.

The level starts you out in an appartment in New Jersey, and soon you go down an elevator that is triggered by a hidden switch on the wall and have to clear out Hoboken NJ and find a way to Manhattan. Finding a key on a dock you get to unblock access to the George Washington Bridge and then have to scurry through ALL of Manhattan to find a red key in Castle Clinton in Battery park, which opens a door that allows you to access one of the Twin Towers. That opens a door that allows you to access Brooklyn and there you have to go to LaGuardia Airfield to get the next key which leads to a split where you must blow up the other Twin Tower, to gain access to a teleport that takes you to the roof of the Empire State Building which leads to a secret entrance to a secret Cloning Lab, which has one of 2 switches you need to flip to access the exit which is behind the Yellow Key Door.  This process can take hours if you get stuck, so be prepared to spend a LONG time figuring out what you need to do, while exploring New York in Doom.

The level is so well constructed it's crazy. Buildings from New York look just like their real counterparts, and even Central Park is accurate. The scale is half size but that's only because Doom could never handle Manhattan at a realistic scale.  Many locations from New York are in the level, including Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge, Some Park in Brooklyn, The Twin Towers, The Chrysler building, Trinity Church, The Empire State Building, and even though they aren't there anymore, the Twin Towers are in the level.  Even though it looks off, the George Washington bridge is in there too.

While this is not a 1 on 1 recreation of New York, it is the best damn recreation of a city I've ever seen in a video game.  Even Boston in Fallout 4 pales in comparison to this! Especially when you see how accurate this recreation is, and how it didn't take liberties with how the city in the game is structured. Fallout 4 has many roads that are frankly totally inaccurate, and this is coming from someone who is a Boston Native and a Fallout 4 fan.   In many places Bethesda took too much liberties with realism and frankly did a poor job getting their Boston to be accurate enough to be a real Boston recreation. This however, is 90% accurate to the Real New York City, you can tell by the street plan in Manhattan that it is spot on. Even though the blocks are smaller and there is less of them, the roads are shaped right, which is something Fallout 4 never did right in many places.

I think this map is on the top 5 best maps ever list for me now and to me is the best city level ever made for doom, beating out downtown from doom 2 by miles. It even lacks the crazy stupid unrealistic unbearable unfair hardcore platforming a lot of doom maps have, which is a HUGE plus. Only one jump is needed to beat the map and that jump is optional and if you avoid a certain road you can skip it. No sign of Bullshit platforming or Balance act Bullshit ANYWHERE, and that is a HUGE plus, coming from someone who is sick and tired of map24 style balancing sections and having to jump from platform to platform over inescapable lava when the platforms are so tiny you can't do it platform by platform.

Anyway, whoever made Planisphere 2 is a Mapping Genius! I doubt we will see a doom level this good for a LONG time. I had fun playing it, even when nomonsters was on to see how accurate it was to the Real New York.  It's too bad Deimos Deja Vue will never equal this, but it's not a bad level either. Either way, it's rare these days that I will get levels this good back to back.......

Screenshots of Planisphere 2:

(Screenshots taken with Doom RLA and an oblige mapset loaded with it and planisphere 2)

Doom Wad Reviews : Switchroom 2 / Coffee Break

 I am doing doom wad reviews now. This is my first one and it is of the doom 2 wad switchroom 2.  I won't be doing these very often but when a wad being played on a youtube channel by someone interests me I will review it.

Switchroom 2 is a project to take the original doom 2 maps and remake them with different themes. So map01 would not be hitech but hellish or urban, map20 would not be urban but hellish or hi-tech, etc. A previous project called Switchroom did the same thing for the ultimate doom levels.

Early on switchroom 2 is very good.  The first 16 levels are quite nicely done. The levels take the original maps and change their theme and when they do it well, they do it well. No issues in maps 1-16 so far for me. Beyond that is where it gets worse however.

Map17, map20 and Map28 devolve into bullshit platforming, a gameplay "style" I loathe.  Bullshit platforming is when you make the player run across multiple small platforms over lava you can't easily escape in one fell swoop, aka you can't do it one platform at a time. Many times they are at different angles and heights so you have to strafe precisely to make it across.  To make things worse, the maps beyond map20 are inconsistent. Map24 and map26 are just plain bad.  Map24 has nothing in common with the map it's supposed to remake (doom 2 map04) and map26 is badly designed with tons of misaligned textures and badly designed animated walls. Overall this was is actually kind of average, being only decent.

The second wad I will review, blows this one out of the water. Coffee Break is an 11 map wad by Matt Tropiano.  It's excellently designed.  I've personally played this one unlike the previous one, and think 99% of the maps I played in the first 9 were amazing.  Map03 is a personal favorite of mine, so is map08 and map09. Level design wise it is ridiculous with an insane attention to detail included.  Overall. this one is really really good.  The map has no issues for me, no bullshit platforming, no insanely hard puzzles, nothing like that, it's just plain fun.

Rating what IMHO are the top 10 difficult FPS Games

 I don't do posts like this often,but when I do I like to cover them in great detail.  I have played over 80 FPS Games, and many of them have turned out to be ones i can easily beat, but these top 10 ones are insanely hard in many ways.  This is a post ranking the top  hardest 10 FPS games I have played. 

Before I begin, I would like to say a few things. These were ranked by their easiest skill only. I didn't do this on the hardest skill, because I never really play on the hardest skill unless I want an extreme challenge, and to me ranking them on their hardest skill is not a good measuring stick compared to doing it on easy, because I find that a lot of FPS games have brutally difficult easy modes these days.  And back in 1998 or so it started to really get notice able with the release of Half Life that easy mode would not be easy anymore.

10: Quake 1

This game is NOT easy and you find that out really early in the game if you dare to play it on  The enemies do a lot more damage than in doom, are far harder, weapons are noticeably weaker than in doom, health is less common and ammo is rarer and you can't pick up as much. That sums it up. Is it fair, sure, but it's a lot harder than games before it.

9: Doom 2

Why is doom 2 on this list. Normally it should not be anywhere near a list of hardest FPS Games, but thanks to it's addon levels, which lean forward rediculous SLAUGHTERMAP gameplay, you get this on the list for it's custom maps only. Stuff like Hell Revealed, Alien Vendetta, Sunder, etc is so hard that it makes the original game look 1/50's as hard.  Massive hordes of medium strength miniboss monsters, huge numbers of revenants, limited health, archviles in big numbers, sometimes even in hordes, cyberdemons being used a lot per level, etc, these kinds of maps push this game beyond Quske 1 in difficulty, but not by much, because even they pale in comparison to the heavy hitters. What makes this only 9 is mods though, with the right mods these maps are far easier, so it is still only slightly harder than quake 1.

8: Hexen

This game is mean. It has a mean streak. Mean traps everywhere, some of them death traps, bottomless pits, crushers that are almost impossible to avoid, extremely confusing puzzles, etc. This game is actually a lot harder than the Doom Games. Heretic is not that hard but hexen sure is!

7: Descent / Descent 2.

This game is fucking hard.  Enemies are very mean, the level design is mazey as hell and gigantic, and it has this crazy "you must blow up the level and escape before the countdown runs out" mechanic. Combine that with hard enemies, limited health/shield, limited lives, and such, and you get one hard game.

Descent 2 is even harder, with nasty enemies that can navigate the mines better than you can and some steal your weapons! It is even worse when you factor in the thief bots in this game.

Weirdly, Descent III is nowhere as hard as the first 2. It is strange, as the enemies are easier to deal with, the thiefs are nerfed a lot and the end game is the only really hard part.

6: Hexen 2

This game is actually FAR harder than hexen 1. Why? Harder enemies and weaker weapons might be what you think would make this game harder, but actually the puzzles are the main reason. First 2 hubs are no harder than the first 2 hubs of Hexen 1, then it gets crazy with over the top puzzles like the tic-tac-toe puzzle and similar in hub 3. Some of these puzzles require you to find hints in other levels that are very hard to find out, or are hidden. Some don't even have a hint! Or a good one. Combine that with hard combat and you have a frustrating experience.

5:  Jedi Outcast

This sequel to Jedi Knight is brutally hard. What makes it hard. Insanely weak weapons, plus brutally difficult snipers that have no signs to tell you where they are, stealth missions, unfair gameplay, you name it.  It starts bearable, but as soon as you reach nar shaddaa it gets insanely hard instantly fast.  The damn snipers in that mission are a bitch and your sniping weapon sucks and unzooms when you try to dodge them.  And that is the only gun that works well on them to make it worse. And to make it worse, they keep on coming in bespin too, and by the time yo.u reach the cairn they are gone, only to be replaced with insanely hard force power puzzles and stealth missions. This one is brutal and unless you like extreme difficulty, avoid it.

4: Serious Sam

Serious Sam is the one exception to the rule on this list. All other high-tier  games on this list have insanely hard easy skills.  But Serious Sam is the one with a pathetically hard super easy skill, but as soon as you crank it up to easy it becomes insanely hard. So if you want to beat it you need to be able to get lucky. It relies on horde combat,  tons of enemies that do lots of damage in battle arenas,  mean placement of enemies, enemies spawning behind you, sniping you, etc to provide insanely hard gameplay. This one is often called brutally hard, and for good reason

3: Half Life

This game actually is the weirdest one on this list due to how easy the beginning is. The beginning before we've got hostiles is easy as pie and the aliens pose almost no threat, but as soon as the grunts show up it becomes brutally hard.  The grunts are so fucking difficult it's not funny, they are intelligent but that's not what makes them hard, it's how much damage they do! Their damage is insanely unbalanced for easy. The grunts go away for one chapter, but as soon as they come back in powerup it gets insanely hard, and then there are the two grunt fest chapters which are insane (On a Rail and Surface tension).  Good luck beating this game on easy, I did it but I got lucky.

2: Deus Ex

This game is marketed as a stealth game, and if you play it that way, it might be easy, but if you try to run and gun through it, it's insanely hard. I found a way to mostly do it and beat it that way, but it all depends on how much skill points you put into gun skills.  And it gets brutally hard later on. Around Paris it is so hard that you need to be stealthy or lucky to beat it   Don't get me started with the save tiffany mission, that is brutally hard as well.

1: STALKER : Shadow of Chernobyl

The hardest FPS I've ever played by far. This game makes Half-life and Deus Ex look easy. Mean traps and anomalies, insanely hard soldiers, limited health, guns that are a bitch and don't fire straight, enemies that can head shot kill you from a distance, etc, this thing is downright mean.  I had to reduce damage to the player to even beat it fairly.....

Quake 1 Mod Review : Small Mod Compilation (SMC)

 I thought randomizer mods for quake were rare. I was wrong. A long time ago I played the excellent quake 1.5 mod for dark places. That mod has randomizer mod features and new enemy models.  It borrows heavily from other mods however, and one of them is called SMC. SMC has the same enemies as Quake 1.5 and has the same reskinned models. The models come from a mod called Arcane Dimensions so it's not entirely original but I don't care much about that. All I know is that SMC may be the best randomzer mod for quake.

SMC requires dark places. For a while I thought I never could run it but it turns out darkplaces has a software renderer that ran fine on my machine. So I played SMC in it with the renderer on and played 7 maps to see if I would get the dreaded lockups and did not (my system cannot handle opengl rendering for some odd reason).  The mod ran fine with only some slowdown.

SMC features a lot of new enemies, some of them from the Quoth mod, others are from arcane dimensions. You will fight enforcer varieties from quoth such as defenders, pyros and eliminators plus a lot of new enemies from arcane dimensions that I am not familiar with, but most of them come from hexen 2. They randomly replace enemies in maps and that is great, and this mod works with any ID1 Compatible map, which is also great.

I tried it with ikspq5 to test out the software renderers framerate and to see if the randomizer mod would break the final room like EXQ did and it did not.  Which is a relief.  That helps this mod become a lot more fun because the maps where enemies get killed to progress will work right 100% of the time.

I recommend this mod, even if you play it in software, it's got a few nasty graphics glitches in software, but besides that it's fine.

Screnshots: